


Even those bearing gifts

by Spylace



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, F/F, F/M, I Don't Even Know, I mean Captain Russia?, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Multi, Natasha Feels, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha is Captain America, Natasha-centric, Protective Natasha Romanov, What Was I Thinking?, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:32:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erskine never meets Steve Rogers. </p><p>The Black Widow shapes the century.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even those bearing gifts

There is a man at Pushkin square feeding pigeons with bourgeoisie.

People glare in scorn. They whisper, what a waste. He must be a kulak, a foreigner, an intellectual. Look at his nose. See how big it is. He might ever be a Jew.

Yelena pinches her elbow black-and-blue. She squirms because it hurts.

“Don’t Natasha. It’s too dangerous! Look around you. No one will help you if you get caught.”

But she is hungry. Yelena is hungry and Yelena is sick. They won’t let her in the factory now that she coughs up blood with her morning coffee. If that man, a foreigner, an intellect, a Jew, can spare feed for the birds, surely he will give some to her.

Natalya seizes her chance. The bread is a little dry but it’s whole. Edible. She looks back as feathers crown her eyelashes and the sun sets her hair afire. The Jew stares as though he has never seen such a thing before. She pushes her chapped lips into a smile and lopes back to Yelena, linking their arms together.

“Wait, wait!” The man hobbles after them and she stops only because Yelena stops, her face drawn as men surround them. “No wait.” The man,  _the Jew’s_ , accent is atrocious. It can hardly be called Russian with the cutoff vowels and glazed consonants. “Please.” He holds out a fistful of coins.

His fingers are clean, ink-splattered. Not a laborer’s hand. She bets her entire savings he’s never worked an honest day in his life. Her eyes narrow when an officer spits off to the side. Nothing official then. Otherwise they would have been taken away already.

Beside her, Yelena is trembling. Her eyes wide with the effort to keep her coughs down.

Biting off a swear, Natalya tugs a handkerchief out of her pockets and presses it to her lips. Yelena coughs gratefully.

“Would...” the Jew asks. “Would you like some more?”

She knows what he is asking. He is not the first man who has sought shelter between her milk-white thighs. She wonders who he is to have such companions, Bolshevik guarding a foreigner, a kulak, a Jew. A baser thought is if he is different down there. All around her, every day words turn into fast whispers. They see her and Yelena. One redhead. The other blonde. They look at her clothing and erase them from their minds. They are ghosts.

Natalya lifts her chin. Never once does she permit herself to think that she may have damned her best friend.

“She comes too.”

 

Her name is Natalya Alianovna Romanova.

The nuns at the orphanage called her the devil for her red hair and slanty eyes, the shopkeepers a thief, Yelena  _Natasha_  and finally this man in tweed, this  _Jew_ , who calls her the girl in red.

Her hair is red. A communist red, the people’s red, her visitors sometimes said and the other girls had writhed in jealousy. Yelena teases and says that it should be called  _Natasha’s red_  because you can see red but you can’t touch the color. Red is not like hair that you can brush your fingers across or rub against your breasts.

She shaves her hair the next day.

The director thanks her for her dedication.

 

Nature abhors vacuums.

Erskine never meets Steve Rogers nor does he die from an assassin’s bullet but which is better? Stalin’s Russia or the indifferent Americas?

A boy dies in Brooklyn but no one takes notice.

One who might have disappears in the frontlines.

And the Black Widow shapes the century.

 

She is a ghost.

Most intelligence organizations believe her existence to be an act of God.

Regimes fall, politicians are assassinated, monarchies abolished, borders redrawn, erased, drawn again. Erskine dies alone in his apartment and it takes five days for anyone to notice. The hammer and the sickle becomes the new world order, warning against western ideals.

When she wakes up, she sees that unlike her, Yelena has aged. New lines crease her face familiar-unfamiliar. The blonde smirks as she feels for her pulse, the tips of her nails searing against her throat. Like fine wine, Yelena makes her throat dry. The sway of her hips making her twitch with want.

This is when Natalya is at her most vulnerable, the moment of intimacy just after the cold.

She wanted this, she asked for this, but she wonders what might have happened if she hadn’t been at the square, smoothing out her skirt with a flirtatious blink.

In a different place, she and Yelena would have been the bitterest of enemies. Yelena would have died in winter and she would have been alone.

Natalya cannot imagine a world without her darling Yelena.

 

“Your country needs you comrade.” Yelena purrs, her face slick with salt. She pushes her back when Natalya nips the tip of her nose. “A mission?” Natalya asks, intrigued.

Against the city lights, Yelena is beautiful. The years haven’t changed that. Her silhouette draws the eye like a bird of paradise. She worries at her lip, her expression thoughtful.

“Of sort.” She concedes.

Natalya holds out her hand.

“Will you be there?”

“Always.”

 

Five boys stand in front of her, each bearing a number instead of a name. She does not bother to keep the disappointment from her voice as she says, “No girls?”

“No comrade. The director specified a matched pair.”

“You should have sent Dmitri.” She counters acid-tongued and the first of her successors bristles at the insult. They all know Dmitri. He is the little spider, a wolf—the  _spare_. Nobody wants to be the second best.

As though realizing his mistake, he adverts his eyes, pale as the rest of him, the color of snow. She is becoming sentimental and she stares him down.

“What is your name?”

“Number four ma’am.”

She hums.

“Fourth in skill or wits?”

“Fourth in height.” He replies insolently, giving up the ruse.

“ _Четыре_.” His handler snaps and he quickly ducks his head.

Her throat bubbles with laughter.

“Come then Four; show me what you have learned.”

 

Four is disappointing.

He knows how to fall. Certainly. He is fast, he blocks off many of her more painful blows and evades as though trying to get away. It is proving to be more effort than it is worth, putting him on his back again and again and again. At the corner of her eyes, she sees his handler redden with embarrassment and the four other candidates itching to prove themselves.

“Why will you not fight back?” She asks.

“Why fight the inevitable?” He quips.

Natalya is instantly charmed.

The boy is right. He cannot win against her. It would be foolish for him to try.

His handler mutters his apologies as she moves off the mats, ending the fight.

“This one.” She tells him and he sputters “But the assessment...! Is not complete.”

She shrugs.

“You require a matched pair. I want this one.”

 

Yelena tells him that he is the eldest of four, that his mother was an intellect, his father a Cossack. He is not a who because he believes everything they tell him, from the inconsequential details like hating peanuts to weaknesses like the fear of heights.

Four is high-spirited. Often gives his trainers headaches.

“But.” She concludes, stroking her hair which she once called  _Natasha’s red_. “You did well solnyshka. He will keep you company for a long time.”

 

Four, she notices, never wastes unnecessary energy.

His scores are exemplary, better even than those of the senior agents on active duty. He becomes better at fighting for all that he never lays a finger on her. But he has an uncanny aim with his rifle, his Makarov, anything that can be thrown. He once knocked a trainee unconscious with a tin cup though he was disciplined harshly after, his eyeballs rolling red for an entire week.

It isn’t until he makes her teeth rattle she realizes he’s been holding back. He’s a sniper, he lives for the split-second windows he makes his shots. And now he’s found one. Luring her into compliance.

She would laugh if she had a moment to breathe. Four can’t win. Which means there is something else that he is fighting for. Something worth the wait, giving his cards away early, punished so that she would think nothing of the stiffness in his body and the books bound to his ribs.

He puts up a fair fight. Impresses her enough that she is willing to listen.

“A name.” He says, washing out his mouth. “I want a name.”

She raises an eyebrow but a question unasked cannot be answered.

“Iosef[1]” She throws casually, for the two most important men in her life. “For the General Secretary.”

Iosef beams despite his bruised face. He looks... young.

Disconcerted, she nods to his handler.

“His name is Iosef.”

No one bats an eye.

 

“Not so young.”Yelena murmurs sleepily, skin supple despite her age. “Old enough to be my son.”

Natalya licks kisses into her spine until she rolls over, knees falling open in an invitation.

Who is she to refuse?

The blonde catalogues the old scars and the new. Defensive wounds, 1936, a knife 1941, smashed knee 1942, German Mauser 1942. Champagne glass 1945, a cheese grater 1946.

She forgets. Years blend together. She suspects they might even make her forget.

But she doesn’t ask this. She is lucky the serum treated Yelena, that whatever retarded her age slows time for her too. Even if they put her back on ice, they have years ahead of them. She doesn’t think to ask and Yelena doesn’t suggest. Natalya has always been the braver one but she doesn’t want to risk this.

“Our son.” She purrs, pressing her tongue against her slit. “What a son.”

Yelena bucks against her face.

“Natasha,  _Natashenka_ , beloved, please...”

She will not risk this.

 

“Why are you not asleep comrade?”

Candlelight dances at his window. He does not put them out. To do so would be an admittance of guilt. Instead, he plays his fingers over them as though touching invisible keys. The flames flicker red and gold.

“I did not want to sleep. So little time Agent Romanova, do you not have things you wish to do?”

Yelena, but she was far away from her today. The director had required her services elsewhere and like a good agent, a dedicated agent of the Red Room, she had gone, ardent kisses making her cheeks flush.

Iosef is young.

This remains a constant.

All boys must grow up.

 

As she sleeps, he makes a name for himself. Over a dozen assassinations are credited to his name; he kills with aplomb, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, killed in their beds. Entire villages razed to the ground to prevent witnesses. It does not matter. Likely, they were all traitors. There is no innocence when your neighbor might be a rebel spy. Only orphans are truly free of this blood debt and orphans they are, the three of them, the children of Mother Russia.

His handlers tell her “He’s dangerous. He’s fast, he’s strong and...”

“He is loyal.” Natalya says, dismissing them. “He is what you made him.”

“They gave him the serum.” Yelena hums in her ear, sweat pooling in the dip of her spine.

She grimaces. Everyone remembers Dmitri, the little spider, the spare. He went mad while Natalya slept and splattered his brains all over the walls. Such tragedy. Waste of resources. They should have gotten rid of him a long time ago.

Had the director learned nothing?

Iosef’s youth is preserved, his face still round with baby fat. Holding his rifle, he looks like a joke. A child playing at being a soldier, a bohemian on the frontlines. But his eyes are old like icy pillars in the North Atlantic. He sits through torture sessions, when men scream so high their voice boxes can no longer make sounds. All through this, he does not bat an eye.

They call him the Winter Soldier.

“You taught him well my love.” Yelena praises, coaxing her in front of the mirror, a hand squeezing her right breast. A shiver goes through her when a finger slides down her pubic bone. The perfect, even skin confuses her. There should be something there she thinks, warmth effusing her belly. Something to remember things by.

“What a son we have.”

 

They run one operation together before she is laid out on ice.

He is at her side when she makes the call. Through binoculars, she can see the target moving towards the window, hidden behind a pillar in his grand palace of bourgeoisie. It surprises her constantly how others have so much while some have little. She can still remember the cold nights and the hollowness in her stomach, the hunger hitting her like a fist when she rolled over to hug Yelena.

He fires through the wall. She hears a gurgle.

“Good work.” She says, her voice brushed with approval. “How do you feel?”

Iosef is quick with his smile, hands stripping his rifle down to its base parts.

“Like a million rubles.”

 

He is so clumsy the first time Yelena is offended on her behalf. But she soon sees the charms of a virgin mouth and a smooth chin. Natalya fingers herself lazily while the blonde fucks him into the mattress, unable to resist.

Operatives are discouraged from physical relationships but who would dare deny her? She is the pride of the Red Room, Yelena her consort, Iosef their heir. He breathes through his mouth and it sounds like he’s sobbing. His forehead grinds against the thin pillows. It isn’t long before he spends his seed against his belly, his cock melting back between his legs, small, inconsequential.

He rolls over, offering his arm to Yelena who falls asleep as soon as her head touches shoulder.

She wonders what he is thinking.

 

They dance together in an endless waltz across the dance floor. She tells him, see this? This was built on the bones of our fathers, strained from the people’s blood. Her hair is red but a people’s red. People deserve justice. This is not justice. They do not question why. Iosef dips her down for a kiss when the Prime Minister chokes to death at a table.

 

They don’t wake her as often as she likes, as long as she likes, not anymore.

Yelena looks worried. She dyes her hair brown, turns her nose up at the bottle of gold-blond Iosef brought back from his trip to Sweden. Now they are a matched pair, she and Iosef. Sometimes they like to poses as mother and son, an aunt and nephews and once, as lovers. Natalya nearly laughed herself sick as they wiped the medical gel off her cold skin.

Iosef is gentler than she can ever remember herself being for all that they are kindred. They are survivors. Natalya the red-haired and slant-eyed child knew the key to survival was to become like Russia in winter. There was no inborn softness in her. Perhaps that had been cut out with her umbilical cord before her mother left her at the footsteps of St. Basil’s Cathedral.

But Iosef the foolish, roguish, charming boy knows what softness is.

Softness is the way he strokes the tendons of Yelena’s ankles, as he holds her hand through the thaw, when he smiles heavy-lidded and a little lonely squashed between them.

She wonders—

 

Seventies is an open conflict. They are in Vietnam.

It’s a set up. They know this as soon as the blood spurts inside the scope and men come pouring out of the building like a tidal wave of ants, all firing in their direction.

They lose each other in the midst of chaos. He returns to her at night, his left side mangled and arm held only by his sleeve.

In the sweltering jungle, his wound quickly turns septic and she has no choice but to cut it off. She pours some of the precious water over the knife before hacking into his shoulder. Iosef bites into her forearm and she bleeds with him all through the night.

They carry each other, staggering through the scorched greenery. A fever begins to burn him from inside out. Iosef grips her tighter as his blood mixes with the earth. His eyes are the only part of him that’s not on fire as it melts little by little on his dirty face.

 

They put him on ice. He doesn’t react well.

Iosef wakes up with no memories of himself. He has to be fed information bit by bit, like a baby bird without feathers. Details are omitted, parts are lost. What she reiterates will never replace what he is. For days, he wanders without direction, his left sleeve pinned up with a gold star. But he remains fast, strong, deadly. He is unrepentant when a handler breathes through a broken windpipe, a speckled of blood on his dimpled chin.

She has never seen Yelena so furious.

The slap stings but not as much as her eyes.

Officially, Yelena is her handler. Unofficially, she is everything.

The regime is over but she doesn’t understand. She’s lived through dictators, presidents, kings and queens. “We are finished Natasha.” Yelena says, shaking her shoulders. When the next man comes into power, a man, a bourgeois, a dreamer, maybe even a  _Jew_ , they will be the first in line receive the seven grams of lead. If they are lucky, they may be exiled the gulag in a remote Siberian post. “We know where the bones are buried.”

The Red Room will be exposed. They will have no choice but to confront the outside world. Better to get rid of everything while they still can and pretend nothing was ever there.

Iosef, without memories, believing everything that is told to him, is lost to them. Useless to them. But useful to those who want a pet assassin. Hydra makes a bid, a gentleman, bispecled, a suit and a brooch pinned to his lapel, inspects Iosef and makes a pleased noise.

“How much do you know about American history Ms. Belova?”

“Only much as the general public Secretary Pierce.” Yelena replies, her smile wolf-like.

He laughs as though remembering a private joke. She will ask about it later, she will ask because there is nothing to risk—they have already lost everything.

His eyes slide to her, her red hair and her slanty eyes.

“Your work has been a gift to mankind. I thank you for your service.”

Pushkin square, 1939. They were little girls who didn’t know any better. She thought she knew all about the cruelties of the world, the injustice, the indifference of the one they called God.

She bobs her head, lifting her chin in pride.

Some things cannot be changed.

“It was my pleasure.”

 

Hydra wants proof that the Winter Soldier can be fixed. They pit him against her, the Black Widow, and the first blood goes to her. Iosef is conflicted, caught between two basic instincts.

His nature tells him to run, avoid conflict, injury, survive. Yet his handlers tell him, fight her, show us what you can do, show us that you can win. Iosef knows that he will not win, not against her. There is nothing to be gained by winning against her—not as he understands it. But weakness is not tolerated in the Red Room. In Hydra, the Winter Soldier will be expected to fight like two dozen men. It will not be a man the KGB hands over in an attempt to unload their sinking ship. It will be a boy. Iosef. Her successor. The son she and Yelena never had. A buffer against the cold.

She scratches the star on his metal deltoid.

“Sentiments are for children.”

He is her best. He has to be better than her.

The paint chips until there is a red stain where the scratches form a scar. Natalya has a dislocated shoulder, a broken wrist, her ribs twinge if she breathes too fast, she is bleeding from her right ear.

Iosef looks afraid. A foreign emotion. Something that should not be present in her heir.

“I don’t understand.”

She parries his blow. It aches down the entire length of her arm.

“You don’t.” Natalya concedes. “But you will.”

Some things must remain a constant.

 

The first time he bests her is bittersweet. He looks conflicted, stares at his mismatched hands as though there is something he can’t quite remember, locked deep inside of him.

Director Tarasova shakes hands with Secretary Pierce. Beside her, Agent Bruskin turns his head away in shame.

This is the end of their time.

 

He seeks her out once before he is due to be sent away, like a package, folded neatly inside a tank. Yelena is inconsolable, her shoulders shaking with each sob. Though dry-eyed in public, Natalya has seen the gray streaks in her hair, the slackness of her breasts, how small she looks with her back swayed inward.

“I know you.” He says. Know, not as a handler, the person who wiped his face clean of cryo-gel. He swallows. “I knew you.”

“Yes.”

He looks pained.

“I am compromised. They did something; they put another person inside my head.”

And she wonders maybe if they tried to do the same to her. Make her love Yelena, love Iosef and Mother Russia. Natalya knows this to be false. She cannot imagine a world where she does not love Yelena freely, willingly. Perhaps in this, remaking her, making her a goddess among men, the fates have done her a great favor.

Now they have come to collect.

Iosef puts a dent in her wall.

“I do not understand.”

“You will.” She says warily, rubbing the bruise on her collarbone. “Because you will not have to.”

“Who am I?” He demands and she tells him. Iosef did win after all.

“Your name is Iosef Chetyrev. You were brought to me to be trained. I have trained you and you are my best. There will never be others like you.”

“They called me the Winter Soldier.”

“A sentimental name.” She says and he repeats, “Sentiments are for children.”

Natalya pushes her chapped lips into a smile. It’s cold in her room. She wants to move somewhere warmer but not too warm. Vietnam is forever present in her mind, the sweltering heat and the stink of rotting flesh. When this is over, she wants to hold Yelena’s hand. They will book a flight together to pats unknown. Where the Red Room and Department X cannot track them and she does not have to sleep anymore.

Iosef is right. There is so little time. And so much she wishes she can do.

“They will break me.” She remains silent. Eyes everywhere and ears. Surely, they are looking for him by now. “They will destroy me.”

She heard in America, they have machines that wipe the mind and take the memories away. Soviet scientists have tried and failed. If they had succeeded, there need not be so many deaths on the tundra. In time, she too will be packed away. Dr. Erskine’s serum runs through her veins but it does not matter. At best, she will be dissected for parts and sold off. Boxed up and forgotten. A relic of an era when her hair was praised as the people’s red.

“Iosya,” she says gently. It is time for bed.

 

The candlelight burns on his windowsill, one last respite before he is sent away.

The corridors are quiet when she locks herself in his room. He does not startle when the door clicks closed. That would be an admission of guilt, of fear. They are the best of the Red Room, once upon soldiers of the Cold War. Between them, they have shed enough blood to paint the building red. A communist red, the people’s red, red of their forefathers and the blood on their breast.

By now, Yelena is far away, has to be far away,  _must be_ , like the wild geese that spend their summers on Siberian lakes.

“Comrade Belova?”

“Not here.”

“Don’t let her see.”

She will not. This is for them alone.

Natalya cups the side of his head.

He manages a smile, weak like watered down milk.

Iosef is many things but he is not a coward.

She only wishes he were.

“Mercy” He mouths.

The crack of his neck is intolerably loud.

She stands alone.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [1]For Josef Stalin and Josef Reinstein (Abraham Erskine’s alias)


End file.
